In this paper I try to synthesize the main dimensions of collectivism as opposed to individualism, as they appear in Cultures and Organizations. Software of the Mind. Intercultural Cooperation and Its Importance for Survival, the book that Geert Hofstede, Gert Jan Hofstede, and Michael Minkov published in 2012. Then I add the considerations of Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars about individualism versus communitarianism, and their formula of reconciling opposite values. Based on these ideas, I offer some reflections on our national culture’s traits which give us some hints of our people’s specific collectivist mentality, and of the impossibility of applying the reconciling …

Research on the relation between self-esteem and body self-esteem is mainly concentrated on adolescents (see van den Berg et al., 2010) and it has been already proved that general self-image is correlated with feelings about your own body, resulting in functional or dysfunctional behaviors: as, for example, withdrawal from the social interactions, eating disorders and depression (Orenstein, 2013). Generally speaking, women proved to be more critical with their own body and the relation between self-esteem and body self-esteem is particularly strong in the case of women (Slater & Tiggemann, 2011). Still, few studies have approached the topic on the normal …

The paper examines the way in which social actors position themselves discursively during final debates for presidential elections, both one toward the other, and toward the content of communication, from the perspective of functional theory of political campaign discourse. Functional theory makes some predictions about the discourse functions of political campaign. All five predictions of functional theory were tested in the two televised debates for presidential elections in Romania: 11 and 12 November, at Realitatea TV station, B1 TV respectively. Our study shows similarities with the results obtained in other countries, and highlights on potential differences, which challenges the functional …

In Romania, older people are more interested in politics than the younger generation. For them, talking about politics is a leisure activity; it is simply recreational for them to exchange opinions as they can easily integrate into any group. Old people are equally interested in the elections and the voting process, participating in a significant number at the elections. Thus, our paper tries to analyse the way seniors get information about politics in general and about the elections in particular, by comparing the communist system with the democratic one. During the campaign, politicians are trying to attract as many senior …

It is not only the historical evolution in stages that the concept of “modern society” is about, but also a typology of societies, which have been known in history. ”Being modern” means – as in the case of a person – not only a stage of evolution, but a way of being as well. When we say we wish our society to become a modern society we have in mind not only the quantitative traits, but also the qualitative traits of a certain society as an organic whole. One of these qualitative traits that belong to modernity is critical thinking, …

The paper focuses on the perspectives of brainstorming technique in the development of students’ professional-creative skills during the process of professional becoming taking into account the objective social and professional needs of future specialists. The brainstorming technique helps the essay writer to examine various viewpoints and decide upon the ideas/points to include in the essay. The purpose of the paper is to analyze the benefits and perspectives of brainstorming technique in the development of students’ professional-creative skills. The author presents the main steps of this technique, which provides a feedback between the teacher and the student and develops students’ professional-creative …

A press release, as an important tool of providing information for the media and general public, has its own specific features regarding its constitutive parts and the manner of writing them. One of the most important parts of a press release is its headline, which provides the first impression for the journalists and readers, as it is the most visible element, both online and in print. The press release headline generally contains elements of addressability and/or self-reference. Being based on a corpus of both English and Romanian press releases concerning education and culture, the present paper focuses on the linguistic …

Although translation studies and discourse analysis are in a perpetual process of expansion and refinement and are constantly acquiring new interdisciplinary milestones, little attention has been given to exploring the connections between these two fields and the category of constructed languages, thus overseeing the ever-growing popularity conlangs have experienced over the past few decades. By following Christiane Nord’s translation typology, as presented in Translating as a Purposeful Activity (1997) and Andrew Chesterman’s classification of translation strategies, as taken from Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory (1997), this paper strives at showcasing a less conventional type of …

The novel written in postmodernity is most of the times characterized by the use of the experiment and by parody and/or pastiche. Malcolm Bradbury, a fine connoiseur of various techniques used in fiction both from the position of a writer of novels, short stories, parodies and TV plays as well as from that of a critic, made use of these in an admirable manner. In My Strange Quest for Mensonge: Structuralism’s Hidden Hero, a novel published in 1987, the author develops a metadiscourse by means of which he allegedly presents the imposing figure of the critic that Henri Mensonge was. …

In their works, a number of eighteenth-century English writers such as Samuel Richardson and Oliver Goldsmith were concerned with moral conduct and the rule of right. Representing the ways in which the doctrine of morality grounded in Christian tenets challenged the social inequality, injustice, moral decay, licentiousness, mercantilism, excessive individualism and glorification of the commercial spirit specific to their age, the two writers advocated the triumph of virtuous conduct against many ills of the eighteenth-century English society. With its central focus on Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), this paper addresses the ways in which the discourse of morality was …

The Victorians obsessed over the supernatural. Their fascination with the otherworldly emerges in the literature of the day. Our paper aims at highlighting the presence of the discourse of the imaginary in several Victorian novels (Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights; Charlotte Brontë – Villette and Jane Eyre; Thomas Hardy – The Return of the Native) and identifying its functions. The paper will approach the discourse of the imaginary and the supernatural from two perspectives: one of the lines of discussion will correlate the use of the imaginary and the supernatural to the characters’ feelings and emotions; the second line of …

Discourse as part of culture reflects social processes in society. In our study, we attempted to apply the system analysis to the study of the evolution of discourse. Human consciousness evolved from the collective unconsciousness and concrete thinking to abstract and logical. Myths, legends, stories were followed by the heroic epics, fairy tales, then household and historical literature. For the analysis, we used the model of the evolutionary cone and showed the correspondence of the discourse to this model. Today, it is important for human development to present for young people worthy examples in literature and culture that can form …

“The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages”, Frank O’Hara wrote in his 1959 poetry manifesto. Personism, the term he used to designate his vision on poetry, referred to the personal in a way that was not very different in essence from Eliot’s repudiation of it, but which can be seen as a counter reaction to the Confessional school that was emerging at about the same time. While the latter brought into the poem the mental disorders, sufferings and psychological peculiarities of its poets, the New York school preferred to mould the urban sensitivity of its …

The present paper aims at studying Western Transcendentalist and Eastern Mystic discourse through their representation in literature. To this end, three poets from both sides, namely Emerson, the American poet, (1803-1882), Khayyam (1048-1131) and Hafiz, two Iranian poets (1325/6- 1389/90), who are religious intellectual thinkers, were selected for the study of their ideas and philosophy, namely Eastern Mysticism and Western Transcendentalism, according to which they interpret the Divinity, established religion, duality, worldly life, spiritual future, fatalism, soul, Over-Soul, resurrection, and symbolic and allegoric terminology in Mysticism. The paper compares the mentioned poets who are representatives of the Mystic and Transcendentalist philosophies …

Dramatic monologue, in its broadest sense of the term, is a potential poetic form of a particular literary period. It has been transformed through time in keeping with the literary approaches, perspectives and conventions related to the different uses of genre, to changing philosophical thoughts and language condition, and to the social and cultural developments in history. Soliloquy is used for various purposes of the writers, from rhetorical strategies for convincing the audience to adopt certain viewpoints to converting the story time into narrative time, and story space into narrative space. Both dramatic monologue and soliloquy are discursive in that they reflect solitary …